Month: January 2025

The war in Yemen and the Red Sea continues to intensify, following several ballistic missiles launched on Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis last week and this month. The pattern is that for whatever the Western coalition throws at the Houthis in terms of bombing raids, the militant group only intensifies its assaults.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that forces under US Central Command (CENTCOM) have launched fresh attacks on Yemen after the Houthi militants targeted American warships and commercial ships earlier the same day.

US Navy ships and aircraft conduced the new attacks, striking Houthi-controlled coastal regions of Yemen, according to the CENTCOM statement.

American warplanes had destroyed “seven cruise missiles and one-way attack UAVs over the Red Sea,” the statement continued. “There were no injuries or damage to U.S. personnel or equipment in either incident,” it said.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam denounced the strikes as “an American aggression” and “a blatant violation of the sovereignty of an independent state and a blatant support for Israel.”

CENTCOM has justified the new action as necessary “to degrade Iran-backed Houthi efforts to threaten regional partners and military and merchant vessels in the region.”

Earlier on Tuesday the Houthis had also launched two more missiles at Israel. These direct attacks on Israel out of Yemen are coming almost daily at this point, and Israeli forces have also stepped up aerial attacks on Yemen in coordination with the Western coalition in the Red Sea.

Just days ago, on Thursday, Israel conducted some of the largest attacks on Yemen to date, hitting the international airport in Sanaa and other facilities. 

But the Houthis have clearly remained undeterred. Short of a full-scale ground invasion, these Western coalition aerial attacks are unlikely to do anything but prolong the war, which the Houthis say is a response to the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip.

CENTCOM Forces Strike Multiple Houthi Targets in Yemen

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted multiple precision strikes against Iran-backed Houthi targets in Sana’a and coastal locations within Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen, Dec. 30 and 31.

On Dec. 30 and 31,… pic.twitter.com/XUKtsZM1U7

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) December 31, 2024

But Prime Minister Netanyahu has also said he won’t relent. “We will continue to crush the forces of evil with strength and ingenuity, even if it takes time,” he said this past weekend after a Saturday Houthi attack incident had wounded 16 Israelis.

“We are determined to cut off this terror arm of the Iranian axis of evil. We will persist in this until we complete the job,” the Israeli leader said, strongly suggesting a series of more attacks on Yemen to come.

Authored by Panos Mourdoukoutas via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The health care industry will be at the crossroads of several trends in 2025: demographics, proposed Medicare changes, staffing constraints, AI innovations, and deregulation.

Demographics will determine the demand for health care services, while Medicare changes, staffing constraints, and technology will determine the supply of these services. Together, these trends will determine the quantity and quality of industry growth in the new year.

Ben Johnston, chief operating officer of Kapitus, sees favorable demographics and innovative treatments driving health care industry growth in the new year.

“We continue to be bullish on the health care industry as the macro forces of an aging U.S. population and new treatment innovations make health care an attractive industry in 2025 and beyond,” Johnston told The Epoch Times.

However, he sees proposed changes to Medicare that would give the states more control of the program and proposed work requirements in exchange for coverage limiting the total number of insured, thus constraining demand for health care services.

In addition, Johnston believes staffing shortages across the industry are exacerbated by limits on immigration, constraining the supply of health care services.

“Reducing future legal immigration could pose a significant challenge to the industry and drive both prices and wait times higher,” he said.

Thomas Kluz, the managing director of Venture Lab, is also concerned about staffing constraints in 2025 for different reasons.

“The pandemic, system inefficiencies, and wage cuts continued to be a present burden on health care workers on top of their drained physical and mental health,” Kluz told The Epoch Times.

He thinks AI technology could help ease the situation.

“AI and automation will be key to taking some of this pressure off by reducing administrative burdens,” he said.

For Dr. Ofer Sharon, CEO at OncoHost, the use of AI in health care and life sciences, such as machine learning and advanced image processing, will significantly drive the health care industry’s growth in the new year.

“For instance, in drug discovery, 2025 may see the first AI-discovered or AI-designed therapeutic targets progressing to first-in-human clinical trials,” he told The Epoch Times via email.

“At the same time, AI-powered diagnostic tools are expected to gain wider adoption in clinical settings, contributing to improved diagnostic accuracy and more personalized patient care.”

Pradeep Kumar Jain, senior director of health care at Tredence Inc., sees care shifting to telehealth, home care, and ambulatory care, making it more accessible and focused on patients.

“These models ensure people get timely and convenient care while improving coordination across different settings,” he told The Epoch Times via email. “Value-based care focuses on prevention rather than treatment, addressing health issues earlier.”

Dr. Stacey Lee, a professor of health care and business law at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and Bloomberg School of Public Health, sees the prospect of changing rules and choices in the health care industry to improve access to services and rein in costs.

“The projected 8 percent rise in health care costs next year will force providers and patients to rethink how care is delivered and paid for,” he told The Epoch Times.

“My work with health care organizations shows that direct primary care isn’t just another payment model—it fundamentally changes how doctors and patients work together. When we strip away layers of billing complexity, we often find that quality and efficiency improve.”

Lee believes that the soaring health care costs will reshape the demand for and supply of health care services, with price transparency becoming a critical factor for the functioning of health care markets.

“My research in health care negotiations shows that when patients can compare prices, it doesn’t just help them make better choices,” he said. “It changes how health care organizations compete and set their prices. The incoming administration’s emphasis on transparency could accelerate these changes.”

If that turns out to be the case, transparency will test how well health care markets balance efficiency with patient protection.

“In my work studying health care law, I’ve seen that successful deregulation requires understanding which rules truly protect patients and which ones just add cost without benefit,” Lee said.

By Alex Kimani of OilPrice.com

Carlos Slim, Latin America’s richest man, boosted his stakes in American energy companies in the current year as the world’s leading tycoons continue betting on fossil fuels.

Slim invested $602 million in Parsippany, New Jersey-based refiner PBF Energy, boosting his stake to 25%, and also bought $326 million worth of shares in Houston-based oil producer Talos Energy.

Last year, the Mexican billionaire’s Grupo Carso SAB agreed to acquire PetroBal SAPI’s stake in two oil fields in Campeche in southern Mexico for $530 million, expanding its bet on energy production. 

Under the deal, Grupo Carso will take a 50% stake in the Ichalkil and Pokoch oil field. According to the company, the fields produce about 16,350 barrels of crude oil equivalent per day. Carso shares jumped to record highs after the deal was announced. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador welcomed the deal despite earlier being critical of energy reforms that opened exploration to private investment,

“Why do I celebrate this? Because it stays in the hands of Mexicans and I’m sure that they’re going to invest to extract crude. I consider that to be good news,” the president said at his daily news conference. 

Obradors’ nationalist policies have seen the Mexican government become increasingly hostile to foreign companies.

Last year, giant oil and commodities trading firm, Trafigura, was forced to scale back its oil trading business in Mexico thanks to shrinking margins.

Trafigura has recorded margin compression due to fuel subsidies by the Mexican government.

Meanwhile, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has continued growing its oil and gas stakes. Two weeks ago, Berkshire Hathaway bought another 8.9 million shares of Occidental Petroleum with the company now owning 260 million shares of OXY. Berkshire Hathaway’s OXY stake is currently worth $12 billion, making it the company’s sixth largest holding.

Authored by Thomas Buckley via The Point,

Farcical falsehoods have underpinned the Biden administration from the beginning, but it all came crashing down in a TV studio in an Atlanta in late June of this year.

The wings melted – Icarus hit the water

The entire point of the existence of everyone around Joe had been to deny, defray, obfuscate, while simultaneously promising him personally that everything was all right.

The staff was Daedalus to his Icarus, building him wings of wax that they knew would be kept airborne by the press…until they weren’t and he plummeted to earth.

For it to remain in power, the Biden administration, since even before his 2021 inauguration, has required that the nation engage in a mass suspension of disbelief.

As the viewer of a sci-fi movie must, in order for the movie to make sense, simply accept that things like warp drive and transporters exist, that suspension of disbelief gives the viewer the ability to follow the plot, to care about the characters – as long as the events and tech in the movie make internal sense, the movie can be watched, tolerated, or even enjoyed.

But relying on the nation to keep up that suspension of disbelief forever was, obviously, doomed from the start. The administration spun more and more lies to keep up the pretense, developing into the political equivalent – both literally and figuratively – of “Battlefield Earth.”

It was akin the “floating world” of Tokugawa Japan, a concept so beautifully summed up by poet Matsuo Bashō in this haiku:

“Year’s end, all
corners of this
floating world, swept.”

Of course, before the June debate, Biden’s minions had spun lie after lie after lie. In 2020, he didn’t campaign publicly because of covid, nothing else, and the obvious falsehoods kept on from there.

He claimed Russiagate was real, that Donald Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” he said he knew nothing of Hunter’s “business” dealings, the “vaccines” were fine, as was the crushing of personal liberty, the withdrawal from Afghanistan went off as planned despite the videos showing desperate Afghanis falling from planes, and on and on.

Despite their protestations along the lines of “the sky is not blue,” the Biden team knew there were problems, and that, even while flightless, Joe’s wings were melting before their very eyes.

To create one last possible glimmer of hope – and, concurrently, to give them enough time to dump him – his team scheduled the June debate as a test run of his competence; the Democrats put Biden out there just to see if he would make it.

He didn’t and in came – over the frustrations of the people that drove Joe out – Kamala; it was supposed to be an actual astronaut, someone who had soared higher than nearly anyone else, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, but a bitter Joe (Jill) put the kibosh on that ASAMFP after his resignation tweet.

He was dotty, he was un-electable, but PelosObama forgot he was still the president, and a cranky one at that and he would/could/should/did lash out at being couped aside.

From that point on, it has been a year of lying dangerously for the administration, spinning patently absurd tales that endangered the entire the world.

Madison Square Garden rally = nazis.

Biden is totally backing Harris.

An internal coup did not take place – it was just the appropriate discretion of a dozen or so people doing what they could to help the nation.

Yes, Hunter got pardoned but that was Trump’s fault.

There was no censorship program.

Joe’s sharp as a tack.

No, he didn’t have a tendency to wander away – that’s on you.

Choco rations went up ten grams last year.

What drones?

Politicians have been lying since they were invented, but very few have built their entire time in office around them. Before he was elected president, Biden was a typical DC tax and spend liberal looking for a little sumthin’sumthin’ on the side. He had no core beliefs and went pretty much were the wind and the donors took him (even they wouldn’t take him to the White House, though.)

He campaigned on normalcy, but instead brought about massive cultural upheaval and the obliteration of public trust all in the service of wildly woke ideas and proposals and policies he had never even cared about, let alone supported, before.

Again, the entire administration was built on a series of lies from its beginning.

But the shift to Kamala made continuing that impossible. While she essentially ran a cut-and-paste campaign (word search everything and replace “Biden” with “Harris”) when she did venture further afield – “joy,” um, finally talking to the press – on her own she spawned a new series of lies.

The public saw Harris and thought “well, at least Joe has an excuse – he’s senile.”

The lies got faster, more disposable, less credible, even sillier, even more insulting, and were screeched even louder by the media.

The lying became more desperate, more dangerous and then – poof!

The election is over and the truth the world knew all along is now starting to be admitted.

To make sense of the past four years, Biden supporters had to suspend their disbelief, to put aside honest critical thinking in order to go for the ride – that attachment was one of the reasons why the entrenchment was so deep, so personal. Turning on the lights at last call in a bar reveals the truth, the reality of the evening and saying anything they did not want hear to progressives was like turning on the lights in the middle of a movie. Jarring, infuriating, guaranteed to end the suspension of belief.

Well, that movie is now done, belief no longer needs to be suspended, and the year of lying dangerously is now over.

Good riddance.